Curiosity Rover’s 1.8 Billion-pixel panorama of Mars

Recently, while all the NASA types were on holiday, the Mars Curiosity Rover got bored and took a panorama. You can’t really blame it, it went to Mars on a two year mission to see if there was the possibility that the red planet (which is mostly brown) was capable of ever harboring life. One year in and the answer was ‘yes’. It then dedicated itself to a variety of experiments and exploration. I wrote pretty excitedly about it all the way back in the simpler times of 2012.

Seven and a half years later, the Mars Curiosity rover is still there just generally being cool. This panorama was taken between the 24th November and 1st December when its NASA handlers were on Thanksgiving. With no one to boss it about it was going to be motionless for several days and so it was deemed a good idea have it take some detailed holiday snaps that would be educational. Curiosity is the name of the game after all. The 1000+ pictures it took all occurred in the same 2-hour period each day so that it looks consistent and pretty. It then took the scientists several months to put all the pictures together.

Given how amazing this has all turned out, coupled with how many Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays there have been over the last 7.5 years, it does beg the question why the boffins haven’t made the Curiosity rover do this kind of thing before. Maybe there is a superb reason of which I am blissfully ignorant, or maybe they just couldn’t be arsed.

The picture above is just a low-res photo to whet your appetite for the feast of detail available on the more high-definition samples. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory website has a selection of versions up to the highest at 2.43 GB and can be found on this link.

In case this is not enough info to satiate your insatiable desire for all Curiosity news, here is a video narrated by NASA Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada that explains some of the stuff you can see in the picture. Enjoy. Good boy Rover!